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noun the anus

Origin & History of “bottom”

Bottom is a wordwith cognates widely represented in other Indo-European languages. It comes ultimately from the Indo-European base *bhudh- or *bhundh- ‘base, foundation’, source of Latin fundus, from which English gets fund, fundamental, foundation, and founder ‘sink’. An extended form of the base passed into Germanic as *buthm- or *buthn-, which produced German boden ‘ground, earth’ and English bottom. The application of the word to the ‘buttocks’ seems to have arisen towards the end of the 18th century.